Islam Cristianity yorubaland

Mellon Foundation Sawyer SeminarUniversity of Michigan, 1-2 April 2011ISLAM, CHRISTIANITY AND THE UNFINISHED MAKING OF THE YORUBAJ. D. Y. Peel

School of Oriental and African StudiesThe literature on how the world religions in my case particularly Christianity have shaped Yoruba ethnogenesis or contributed to the making of the Yoruba may be supposed to carry two unfortunate implications: that Islam has not also had a significant role and that Yoruba identity has somehow reached some kind of fulfilment or final state. Moreover, we cannot go far in the exploration of these issues, before realizing that what we have to deal with is, not just the mutual impact of Yoruba society/culture on the one hand and the world religions on the other, but the mutual influences which have flowed between the two religions, influences which have been powerfully shaped by the fact that their competition has had to take place under Yoruba rules. World religions, being the kind of entities that they are global faith communities, conversionary, inclined to exclusivism and endowed with a strong sense of their own historic projects have struggled against these local conditions even as they have been forced to compromise with them. The Yoruba ambience, in turn, has both welcomed them and proved subtly capable of bending them to its ethos up to a point.While it is common to refer to an evolving Yoruba identity, it is not so easy to speak of a Yoruba project as a consistent material or organizational reality, though something of the kind has been discursively invoked by politicians and intellectuals. This has surged with particular intensity at two periods: the efflorescence of cultural nationalism in the 1890s and the articulation of a political programme by the Action Group in the 1950s, both movements in which Christians played the principle part. If the ground of the Yoruba project is cultural, its political potentiality is never entirely absent, from the retrospection to the Alafin Abiodun that rounds off Samuel Johnsons History of the Yorubas to the political velleities that hover in the concluding parts of S. A. Akintoyes recent History of the Yoruba People. Ever since the death of Obafemi Awolowo in 1987, the Yoruba project now more often described as a national project than it used to be has faltered, frustrated by the inconclusive jockeying over Awos political heritage, the contradictory ambitions of M.K.O. Abiola, the disappointments of the Obasanjo presidency, the failure to get the much-demanded sovereign national conference, the lure of the diaspora, but above all by the corrupting embrace of the Nigerian state.

The Yoruba are half-and-half Muslim and Christian, and the tradition of relative amity between the two faiths is not only essential to social cohesion at all levels from individual towns to the pan-Yoruba, but actually a component of the collective self-image of the Yoruba: we all go to one anothers festivals. While they are inclined to see it as if it were part of an enduring cultural essence, its real conditions will only be understood if it is treated as a historical accomplishment. It certainly derives support from some features of Yoruba society as the world religions met it the acceptance of cultic choice, the institution of obaship, pragmatic criteria of religious value etc. but it has also crucially depended on the ways in which the world religions have sought to realize themselves, and relate to each other, in the Yoruba setting. It is this which I want to explore in this paper, through the means of a comparative history. So how have Christianity and Islam sought to position themselves in relation to Yoruba culture and society? In the early days around the 1870s, let us say Christians were widely seen as standing right apart from it, and Muslims as fully at home in it. The guiding question I want to ask, which for the sake of argument Ill state in a strong form, is this: has it come about, over the past century and a quarter, that as Christians have found ways to reconcile themselves with Yoruba culture, Muslims (or at least the most Islamically self-conscious among them) have sought to distance themselves from it? Can we even say that a kind of reversal has come about, such that now it is Christians who are Yoruba undifferenced, while it is Muslims who are Yoruba marked by religious difference? The contrasting trajectories of the two faiths, it would seem, are in accord with their respective cultural logics: both have been true to themselves in the histories they have produced. In what follows, my argument moves through five sections: (i) the Yoruba Christian project of inculturation or Africanization; (ii) the Yoruba Muslim project for attaining a greater Islamic authenticity; (iii) competing Muslim views and practices about their placement in the wider Yoruba context: (iv) Sharia in relation to Yoruba conceptions of community; and (v) religion as a factor in Yoruba politics. If I say more about Islam as we move towards the present, it is largely because, while Christian views about their cultural predicament were central to the age of nationalism, it is the views of Muslims about what their faith requires of them which seem to me most critical for how inter-faith relations, and the religious conditions for Yoruba cohesion, will develop in the near future. The late 1970s can be seen as the tipping-point between these two phases of Yoruba cultural history.IChristianity: indigenization and cultural nationalism

A good place to start is with some comments by Edward Blyden, the West Indian-born pioneer of African nationalism, adopted citizen of Liberia, critic of the missions and admirer of Islams cultural achievements in West Africa. In Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887), Blyden compared Christianity unfavourably with Islam as regards its local adaptation, which he linked to the continuing enthralment of Christian converts to their missionary mentors. Whereas with Islam, he argued, the Arabic superstructure has been superimposed on a permanent indigenous substructure, so that what really took place, when the Arab met the Negro in his own home, was a healthy amalgamation, and not an absorption or an undue repression ..., the local Christians remained mere imitators, who try to force their outward appearance into, as near as possible, a resemblance to Europeans. Despite this, he felt that they challenged heathenism less effectively then Muslims Blyden was no primitivist and failed to bring about real cultural change. This severe indictment was actually shared by some in the missions, notably Rev. James Johnson, pastor of Breadfruit church in Lagos, as fiery a nationalist as he was an evangelical and an evangelist. Christians, he wrote in 1874, are regarded as a people separate from them [the mass of Lagosians], as identifying with a foreign people, and the dress they assume has become a mark of distinction. Johnson responded by putting strong pressure on his parishioners to wear African dress, and insisted on giving Yoruba names in baptism. In the wave of cultural nationalism in the 1890s, the adoption of Yoruba names and dress was a sign of commitment to the cause. Names and dress, the key personal markers of social identity, are a theme Ill be returning to later.

It was both paradoxical and painful for Christianity, a religion that had put provision of Gods Word in the language of the people at the very heart of its evangelistic strategy, to find itself treated as alien, compared with its rival, that had insisted in keeping its Word in the language in which it had first been delivered, a language incomprehensible to all but a handful of Yoruba Muslims. Even the imams khutba was first given in Arabic and afterwards rendered into Yoruba. Since the missionaries including radicals like James Johnson were neither ready nor able to do much to modify the content of the message to the Yoruba (e.g. as regards polygamy, the provision of charms, or domestic slavery), there were only two things to be done: (i) to hope that with cultural change under colonial conditions Christianity would come to be positively valued and lose its aura of strangeness; and (ii) to find ways to persuade the Yoruba that, despite its strangeness, Christianity was actually the fulfilment of their historical destiny and the realization of the best potential in their old religion. The framework within which was eventually achieved was the new extended category of Yoruba i.e. the Yoruba as we know them today, including all the non-Oyo groups which the Church Missionary Society first conceived. This was built on a combination of two values the richness of their traditional culture and their modern enlightenment which might once have been thought of as opposed or incompatible.

To this project, works on history and on religion were critical: religion because that was where Yoruba culture was at its most distinctive, and history as the medium through which the relations between tradition and modernity needed to be articulated. As to history, all other early historical writing by Christian clergy or laymen pales into insignificance besides the scale and scope of Rev. Samuel Johnsons The History of the Yorubas. Since Johnsons masterpiece has received a good deal of critical appreciation, I here do no more than to briefly note its audacious central argument: that the historical redemption of the Yoruba would be achieved by a combination of two seemingly contradictory forces, namely the missions which brought Christian enlightenment, and the armies of Ibadan which held off the Fulani threat. Through the fusion of Christian and Yoruba values, the glory of Old Oyo, as in the happy days of [the Alafin] Abiodun, could be revived in a new form.

The Christian literature on Yoruba religion is more varied and sustained, but contains no work of the calibre of Johnsons History. Yoruba religion, qua discursive construct, was something devised by Christian evangelists to further their project of conversion. It served to throw a single concept round a body of practices which had not previously been so unified by those who engaged in them; and it treated as a single pan-Yoruba phenomenon what was in reality a spread of local cult-complexes. However conceived, Yoruba religion was complex, but undoubtedly the orisa cults were its centrepiece: they above all were what converts had to renounce, handing over their images for destruction. The greatest such staging of conversion was the mass iconoclasm at the Aladura revival at Ilesha in 1930-31, where the abandonment of orisa was linked with the renunciation of other works of evil witchcraft, bad medicines, charms or juju in a grand demonization of past ritual practice. But since the old religion had met real and continuing needs, this dramatic rupture at the phenomenal level had to be combined with functional alternatives at the existential level, through the Aladura prophets like Muslim alfa before them - providing their own means of healing, guidance and protection against enemies.

But demonization, however leavened with practical substitutes, could not generate pride in tradition. For that other strategies were needed. One was de-sacralization, where items of heathenism were rendered inoffensive by being taken out of the category of religion. This was first attempted with the Ogboni society in its religious aspect a cult of the earth which was argued to be none other than African freemasonry; and then (since many were not persuaded by this) became further refined into the Reformed Ogboni Fraternity, the brainchild of that interesting man, Archdeacon T. A. J. Ogunbiyi. Then a home-grown euhemerism allowed orisa to be reconfigured as kings, heroes and great men of old, who had been deified after their deaths. This enabled them to be honoured by Christians as ancestors and founding fathers. In recent decades, a highly reified concept of culture has been very useful: annual rituals of the patronal deities of the community, like the Ogun festival at Ilesha, Oramfe at Ondo, Eyo in Lagos, Obanta and Agemo in Ijebu, are promoted as cultural festivals pure and simple (though again, as well see, not everyone is happy to go along with this redefinition).

Of all the traditional cults, that of Orunmila, the orisa of the Ifa divination cult, stood in a class of its own. Its priests, the babalawo, were treated with a unique degree of respect by the Yoruba clergy. It was reinterpreted in two ways. (i) Following the de-sacralization strategy, its corpus of oracular verses (the Odu of Ifa) were seen as containing Yoruba philosophy, a body of ancestral wisdom, a cultural archive. Ifa was, wrote Rev. D. O. Epega, the embodiment of the soul of the Yoruba nation, and the repository of their knowledge, religious, historical and medical. This outlook continues strongly in the work of Yoruba scholars working in various cultural fields down to today. (ii) Its sacred character was allowed, but treated as an anticipation, even a partial pre-revelation, of Christ. The Rev. E.M. Lijadu, in particular, glossing the name Orunmila as It is heaven which knows reconciliation, saw it as pointing to Christ as its complete fulfilment. The culminating work in this tradition was a remarkable Ph.D. thesis alas, still unpublished completed in 1976 by Rev. E.A.A. Adegbola, Ifa and Christianity among the Yoruba: a study in symbiosis and the development of Yoruba Christology. But this was always a tricky line-call for clergy of a cultural-nationalist inclination to make, since they ran the risk of valorizing Orunmila to such an extent that he, rather than Christ, came to be seen as Africas saviour and redeemer. This did in fact happen. A short-lived Ethiopian Church, founded by a Prophet Adeniran in Lagos in 1918, argued that each people had its own saviour: Jesus for the Europeans, Mohammed for the Arabs and Orunmila for the Africans. There followed an Ijo Orunmila (Church of Orunmila), modelled on a Christian church but with an Iwe Odu Mimo (Book of the Holy Odu) in place of the Bible, founded in 1934, which continues to exist, a minor current within the broad stream of Yoruba religiosity. Professor Wande Abimbolas contemporary promotion of Ifa as itself a potential world religion belongs to the same tradition ... though nowadays the audience for that kind of thing is more in America than Nigeria.

So Yoruba Christianitys efforts to reconcile itself with Yoruba history and culture, when set alongside institutional development such as the emergence of the African and Aladura churches and the Africanization of the mainline mission-founded churches, especially after 1945, ran parallel to the general narrative of nationalism. Indeed the political nationalism of the period 1945-60 is better seen as following, rather than leading, developments in the religious field. The symbolic apogee of nationalism was surely FESTAC, the Second World Festival of Black and African Arts and Culture, which took place in Lagos in 1977: a grand cultural jamboree sponsored by the Nigerian state, then flush with new oil revenues, which was intended to mould its diverse traditional cultures into a national culture and to proclaim Nigerias leadership in the African world.

This event evoked protests, not merely for its extravagance and the corruption that it gave rise to, but on religious grounds too, from both Muslim and Christian groups, angry that the promotion of African culture should be the occasion for putting on performances that (they argued) served to showcase idolatrous religion. That some Muslims were not happy with this is not surprising (for reasons well see in a moment). What is more striking is the new indication of Christian estrangement from the cultural-nationalist project which mainstream clergy had had such a large part in shaping. This reaction against the trajectory of nearly a century was headed by the emerging Neo-Pentecostals: it was in protest against FESTAC that Pastor E.A. Adeboyes Christ the Redeemers Ministry now a core agency of RCCG was born. Like the cloud no bigger than a mans hand which presaged Elijahs humiliation of the prophets of Baal, this was the first public showing of, not so much a new attitude, as the revival of the old strategy of demonizing, rather than de-sacralizing, what was left of the old religion. Thus it came about that the new movements in both Christianity and Islam found common cause in a post-nationalist cultural agenda, through their prescriptions for what should replace it were deeply at variance.

IIIslam: from the local to the universalSo what had meanwhile been going on in Yoruba Islam? The first thing to note is how relatively unengaged it was, either with colonialism or the nationalist reaction to it. Although colonialism had created conditions for the massive expansion of Yoruba Islam in the early decades of the C20, it was never symbolically associated with it, in the way that Christianity as the religion of the oyinbo (white man) was. But nor was it intrinsically hostile to it, as much Muslim opinion in Northern Nigeria was. That is not surprising, since there the British had overthrown an Islamic state and, as many saw it, subjected Muslims to the shameful and unnatural condition of being ruled by Nasarawa (Christians). As a result, radical nationalists in the North like Saadu Zungur, critical of the way the British had co-opted the emirate structure, were well able to ground both their socialism and their nationalism in their Islam. It is illuminating to draw a contrast here between Saadu Zungur and Adegoke Adelabu of Ibadan: both Muslims, both professed socialists, and both affiliated to the NCNC in opposition to the dominant parties in their own respective regions. But Adelabu, though his populist Mabolaje Grand Alliance had its core support from Muslims and took on a certain local Muslim style, made no connection between his religion and his politics. Quite the reverse: in his robust exposition of his political credo, Africa in Ebullition (1952), he referred to his own Muslim identity as being by chance, even as something he deprecate[d] ... more so when you import it into the political arena. As Northern Muslims had a religious motive for nationalism that Yoruba Muslims lacked, so Yoruba Muslims lacked the motive for Africanizing their religion that Yoruba Christianity had. We might even argue that, if Africanization is parallel to nationalism, the dominant trend in Yoruba Islam was counter-nationalist, since it was a movement away from the Africa-specific towards a more universal Islam. This trend had begun haltingly in the 1930s, but accelerated in the late colonial period, so the apparent step-change at the end of the 1970s did not come from nowhere.

A telling little episode in this process occurred in the mid-1950s. It had become customary for the senior alfa of Ibadan to visit the Olubadan and chiefs annually on the 10th day of Muharram to pray for their welfare and to divine for the coming year. Rituals would be performed to help realize good predictions and avert bad ones; and afterwards saraa would be given to the alfa to make a feast for their people. This was known as Gbigbohun-Tira (Listening to the Voice of the Text). Both in form and function, it closely followed the model of a rite called Odifa-Odun (Casting Ifa for the New Year), which babalawo had performed. Controversy had raged since the 1930s about the Islamic legitimacy of this practice: was it an idolatrous abuse of the sacred text of the Quran, or a justified expedient to replace Ifa with something more Islamic and to give a more Muslim face to public authority in Ibadan? The person who saved the ulama from further argument by abolishing the custom altogether was the first Christian to be Olubadan (1955-64), the ascetic I.B. Akinyele, who was also head of the Christ Apostolic Church. The irony of the situation was not lost on Shaykh Murtada, who celebrated his triumph in an Arabic poem he circulated to his colleagues: You abused the book of Allah by taking it to a place filled with filth on all sides ...When the Christian among you ascended the throne, he removed from Islam some of its evils by saying, I dont want your book, my Christianity rejects it. What sort of wonder [is this]? His opponent, Ahmad al-Rufai, had cited a hadith in which the Prophet had backed some of his Companions who had taken a sheep in payment for having given magico-spiritual help to a pagan Arab chief: a once cogent precedent that no longer had such force.

One thing that this episode highlights, when we set it alongside the treatment of Ifa in the Africanizing theology of this period, is how differently Islam and Christianity related themselves to this unique feature of Yoruba religion. Islam and Ifa went back a long time together in Yoruba history: indeed, I follow Louis Brenner in thinking that Ifa actually arose as a Yoruba response to the stimulus of Islam, possibly as far back as the C16. Thereafter, Ifa and Islamic divination existed in parallel; by the C19, their respective practitioners could actually cooperate with one another on difficult cases. Christianity, of course, only encountered Ifa in the 1840s. The kind of cognitive bridges that the two world religions respectively built between themselves and Ifa were very different. A Muslim legend of the origin of Ifa attributes it to one Setilu, who can be identified with Satih, a magician of pre-Islamic Arabia. Ifa was thus set fully within an Arab-Islamic genealogy that carries the implication that Ifa, like other works of pagan jahiliyya, must in due time be set aside for Islamic truth. By contrast, the Christian theology of Ifa, as proposed by a cultural nationalist like Lijadu (who actually went to the trouble of taking instruction from a babalawo), saw it as a partial revelation of God to the Yoruba themselves, which could therefore serve as a praeparatio evangelica, a springboard into a distinctively Yoruba Christianity. This Christian invention of a continuity with something with which it had no prior historical links, stands in contrast to Islams insistence in principle on rupture from something with which it had a long historical relationship.

So Yoruba Islam struggled against the inclination of most ordinary Muslims, one has to say to disown aspects of its own local past, to cast aside some of those syncretistic practices which had earlier given it an entry into Yoruba society. Increasingly the Middle East is looked to as a source of best practice, particularly by those of Salafist views. Among these, A.-R. Shittu drew an interesting contrast to me between the ways in which the two world religions had come to the Yoruba. Christianity, he suggested, had come in a fairly pure form, directly from its centres in places like Rome and Canterbury, but Islam had come through many African intermediaries, picking up a lot of bida (innovation) along the way. His view of the history of Christianity is no doubt too generous, but it entails a characteristically Muslim perspective: that the movement away from the Arabian point of origin, which was equally temporal and spatial, unavoidably carried a decline from original truth. (We might note in passing how different Shittus assessment of African Islam is from Blydens, whose praise for Islam ironically presupposed a quintessentially Christian view of the proper relationship between religion and culture). So Shittu is consistent in also arguing, against mainstream Muslims who accuse him of being too prone to import Saudi customs, that the Islam of its heartland in Saudi Arabia must be considered purer, less subject to bida, than the Islam of its spatial periphery. This perspective was no doubt encouraged in the experience of Yoruba undertaking the Hajj, whose numbers boomed in the 1950s, and again in the 1970s.

The Middle East may be said to have first intervened, directly and decisively, in Yoruba Muslim affairs in the early 1970s. In 1970, the World Muslim League formally declared Ahmadiyya to be a non-Muslim organization on the grounds that its founder, Ghulam Ahmad, had made claims about his inspired status that challenged Mohammeds unique position as Khatam an-Nabiyyin (Seal of the Prophets). This fed through to Nigeria by 1974, after the Saudi Arabian embassy announced it would no longer grant visas to Ahmadis wishing to undertake the Hajj. The impact of this fell almost exclusively on Yoruba Muslims, since Ahmadiyyas membership (like that of NASFAT today) was virtually limited to Yorubaland. The most dramatic casualty was Professor I.A.B. Balogun the doyen of Yoruba Arabists (with a doctorate from SOAS), imam of the UI mosque, an Ahmadi for 40 years who recanted after much soul-searching. This caused consternation in Ahmadiyya ranks, since he took many others with him. A large group seceded, calling themselves Anwar ul-Islam; nearly all the schools Ahmadiyya had founded were eventually lost to it; and though it has since been re-organized from the headquarters in Pakistan, the moment has passed when Ahmadiyya made its most important contribution to the development of Yoruba Islam. Taken together, the pressure on local syncretisms like Gbigbohun-Tira and the expulsion of Ahmadiyya amount to a kind of pincer movement on the distinctively Yoruba expression of Islam, squeezing it at both the traditional and modern ends of its range, in such a way as to move it overall closer to the orthodox Sunni mainstream (and also reduce the differences between it and the Islam of Northern Nigeria). Ahmadiyya had been at the forefront of Yoruba Muslim modernity, but it had become by now a rather old-fashioned modernity, symbolized in the kind of dress that Ahmadi leaders had once liked to wear: a double-breasted suit with a red fez. Non-Ahmadi Muslims also resented a certain exclusiveness in Ahmadis, expressed in the feeling that they only liked to pray behind an Ahmadi imam. They had a definite feel of the colonial period about them politically they had been pro-British and strongly opposed to violent Islamic militancy. The takfir against them allowed other conceptions of Muslim modernity to come forward: more militant and assertive, and more in tune with contemporary currents in the wider world of Islam.

No Muslim organization registered these changes over the course of the 1970s as closely as the Muslim Students Society (MSS). It had been founded in 1953 by a group of pupils attending various secondary schools in Lagos, led by a student at Kings College, Abdul-Lateef Adegbite. (He is the half-brother of the historian S.O. Biobaku, and later went on, following a PhD in law at SOAS, to a distinguished career as a lawyer and administrator). In its early years MSS whose base would soon move to the universities was mainly concerned with giving social support and promoting fellowship among Muslim students in institutions where they were massively outnumbered by Christians; but over time its focus shifted more towards the intersection of religion and politics. It changed its motto three times in its first twenty-five years: from Peace, Love and Community to Peace, Faith and Brotherhood, and finally to the Kalimah itself, There is no god but Allah ... That sequence tells its own story: the development of a more defined and consciously orthodox Muslim identity. In 1969, over half the area chairmen of MSS had been Ahmadis (which is not at all surprising, granted their high level of education); and one effect of the takfir against them had been to clear the way for a much more radically-inclined leadership to take over. In the early 1980s, some MSS activists actually received para-military training in Libya.

This sharpening of Islamic identity went with a desire, both to pull apart from some institutions in which Yoruba Muslims had joined with Christians (such as Boy Scouts and Girl Guides), and to establish closer ties with their Northern co-religionists. MSS, as a body originating in the Yoruba South, was at first regarded with reserve by Northern Muslims, though it made a point of appointing some emirs as patrons; and eventually it did establish itself firmly on Northern campuses. At a higher level, MSSs founder, by now Dr Adegbite, gave much effort to setting up the first all-Nigerian Muslim body, the Nigerian Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs (NSCIA). All this was triggered by the embarrassment felt by Nigerian Muslims at a conference in Libya in 1973, when there was no single national voice to speak for them. Dr Adegbite took discreet soundings with the Sultan of Sokoto, who first suggested that Yoruba Muslims should simply join Jamaatu Nasril Islam (Society for the Victory of Islam), which had been set up in 1962 in the context of the Sardaunas Islamization campaigns in the North. Adegbite advised against this: he must have known very well how it would have played in places like Ikorodu and Ijebu-jesha. Even as it was, the Sultan became President of the NSCIA and an official of JNI, his close relative Ibrahim Dasuki (later Sultan himself), became its Secretary-General, while Adegbite had to settle for the post of Legal Advisor. This was undoubtedly humiliating, and it served to confirm suspicions that Northern Muslims regarded the Yoruba as very much their junior partners. It meshed with the stereotype, still widely current today though denied by some senior figures, that Hausa or Fulani Muslims are reluctant to pray behind a Yoruba imam.

Though Yoruba Muslims sometimes find the existence of their fellow-Muslims in the North a useful counter-weight to the influence of Yoruba Christians, their relationship with them is very ambivalent. It must have worked towards a more uniform and presumptively more orthodox practice of Islam throughout Nigeria though here Yoruba Muslims have sometimes been able to outflank the supposedly more correct Northerners. A perennially vexed issue has been over the fixing of the dates for key Islamic festivals such as Ileya or Id al-Adha, the day of sacrifice at the end of the Hajj when the very strong normative ideal is that the whole umma should celebrate in unison. Tradition dictates that the exact date should be fixed by sighting the new moon, where the Sultan had a procedure which settled it for the Sokoto Caliphate - but it sometimes led to a celebration one day out from other parts of the Muslim world. Many Yoruba Muslims have argued for following the lead of the Grand Mufti of Mecca, thus enabling them to claim they are more universalist as Muslims than the Hausa-Fulani are. Some bold spirits, such as Professor Amidu Sanni, imam of the Lagos State University mosque, have gone so far as to argue that Sultans claim to be regarded as the Spiritual Leader of Nigerian Muslims is un-Islamic, because it depends on hereditary succession, which has no legitimacy in Sunni Islam. It is a rather adroit strategy of Yoruba self-positioning as Sunnier than thou.

IIIThe differentiation of Muslim identityThe search of Yoruba Islam for a greater religious authenticity, which has led it over several decades both to sever itself from some of its distinctive local forms and to associate itself more closely with currents in the wider Islamic world, has also made many individual Muslims want to present themselves more distinctly as Muslims within the community, through the two main social indicators of personal status: dress and names. This self-differentiation seems linked to other kinds of differentiation, actual or wished-for, which must tend to reduce the amount of commonality which has hitherto existed between Yoruba Muslims and Christians.

Dress. A generation ago, it was virtually impossible to distinguish people by religion in a Yoruba crowd, whether in a market or on a campus. Now it is much more common to be able to identify some people as Muslims, particularly women. Women in full black purdah (called eleha in Yoruba) are much more often seen now, especially in the back quarters of towns like Ibadan. Once associated with small traditionalist sects such as Bamidele and Lanase, which adopted it from pious circles in Ilorin or Hausaland purdah is now encouraged by newer groups of Salafi or Deobandi views like Ahl us-Sunna or the fast growing Tabligh, from Pakistan. There is strong criticism of it from within the mainstream ulama, who in general are firmly opposed to it, for making Islam look alien and for impeding the activity of Yoruba women as traders, but it seems to be growing. More novel is the wearing of indicative dress hijab or full-length jilbab by some Muslim women students on campus. A large notice-board authorized by the MSS outside the UI mosque proclaims: O children of Adam! We have bestowed raiment upon you to cover the whole of your body and as an adornment and the raiment of righteousness ... (Q. 7:26). Women so dressed, at least at the University of Lagos, are liable to have sharia! shouted derisively at them by male students. The comportment of women students can be controversial within the Muslim community: a few years ago, some particularly ardent female Salafists at UI adopted the practice of sitting sideways at their desks during lectures so as to avoid making eye-contact with their male professors and were robustly criticized for so doing by the then university imam, Dr D.A. Tijani, in a Friday sermon. Whether such displays are strictly due to a desire to follow Sharia, or to a more general wish to declare Muslim identity in public, is a moot point. Certainly the adoption of hijab as part of the school uniform for girls in Islamic primary schools, which is quite common, has to be seen as the latter, since the Sharia is only concerned with what adult or adolescent women should wear.

As regards male dress, there were always some discreet indicators of Muslim identity, such as the wearing of white embroidered caps, and recent changes (such as the straggly beards sported by some Ahl us-Sunna members) have been less conspicuous than in the case of womens. A couple of high-profile instances are more notable for what they tell us about Christian attitudes towards Muslims wearing un-Yoruba dress. As early as the 1950s, Awolowo is said to have rebuked the Alafin of Oyo for attending a meeting of obas wearing an Arab head-dress he had just returned from Mecca as an alhaji - rather than the customary beaded cap. A rather similar incident occurred between Awos political son, Bola Ige, and the leader of the MSS, K.K. Oloso, at a stormy meeting in 1981 over pro-Christian bias in the Oyo State Governors educational policies. Ige insultingly called Oloso omo-ale [bastard] for wearing a long Arab gown; to which Oloso smartly retorted, Who is more of a bastard? pointing out, to the cheers of his followers, that Ige was wearing a French suit.

There are complex and interesting questions about the evolution of Yoruba dress to be addressed here. Many, if not most, kinds of dress were introduced through distinctively Muslim or Christian channels and were likely at first to be seen as religious identity markers, though this was not inevitably the case. In fact what is regarded as the Yoruba mans dress the gown with voluminous open sleeves (agbada), usually hitched up onto the shoulders, embroidered at the neck, worn with a long sleeved blouse (buba), loose trousers (sokoto) and some kind of cap is essentially of Northern Muslim origin. (As late as the 1880s, it was not worn by local people in south-eastern areas like Ondo, where Islam had no presence). A European missionary at Abeokuta may have been referring to its adoption when he wrote in 1847 that Mahomedan costume is become very fashionable with the young and gay, adding that it is by no means put on as a religious peculiarity. Like many other items or concepts introduced from the Muslim North, this costume rapidly lost what connotations of Islam it originally possessed and passed into the religiously-unmarked cultural repertoire of the Yoruba. The same happened with the European dress shirts and trousers, suits for the wealthier - which once proclaimed Christians as such (and which James Johnson excoriated as culturally alien). From our present perspective, two general distinctions have emerged in how the Yoruba classify dress: (i) between traditional or African and modern or international styles; and (ii) between dress which expresses religious identity and that which is religiously unmarked. As regards (i), the two dress styles have virtually lost all the religious connotations, respectively Muslim and Christian, which they once had: Muslim bankers wear suits and ties like other bankers, while traditional dress is obligatory for everyone at weddings and funerals (and, since nationalism, for politicians at public events) as well as for obas and chiefs. In general, educational settings require religiously-unmarked modern dress, especially for the young, though (as noted above) some Muslim women now advertise their faith by their dress. As regards (ii), apart from the professional dress of clergymen, nearly all religiously-marked dress is worn by Muslims, while Christians appear as Yoruba unmarked by religious difference (with, I think, the single exception of white-garment Aladuras on their way to church, when they actually look a bit like some Muslims!).

It must be stressed that these distinctions are flexible and contested as regards to their specific content: the value or meaning attached to a particular item of dress may change. So in the Ige/Oloso confrontation referred to above, Oloso surely intended a strong statement of his Muslim identity by wearing the Arab-style gown, just as the Alafin meant to express his pride as a new alhaji though here I presume with no combative implication - by wearing an Arab head-dress at the meeting of traditional rulers with Awolowo. Yet something like the gown seen as Islamic when worn by Oloso in 1981 a straight, long-sleeved gown or kaftan, reaching down to just above the ankles, worn with trousers underneath (sometimes known by the Hausa name dandogo) has since then come into fairly general use, and may be worn instead of the agbada for occasions like going to church. So it has lost its religious marking and become traditional, while other items like the Arab head-dress and the turban have retained their Islamic character. In effect, then, it seems to have been Christians whose decision to adopt an originally Islamic dress-item as theirs that makes it generically Yoruba: as in other spheres, they have fallen into the role of being the principal arbiters of what counts as general Yoruba culture. No doubt this lies behind Awolowos reprimand of the Alafin: an oba, of all people, should be the complete embodiment of Yoruba tradition, and not express a religiously partisan identity at an official meeting.

Names. The choice of personal names between European and Yoruba - was the other key focus of cultural self-reproach by Christian radicals in the C.19. Who could consider somebody called Thomas Babington Macaulay or Joseph Pythagoras Haastrup to be a proper African? The pressure among Christians for Yoruba baptismal names to be used built up over many decades to the point that today, in any list of names (e.g. a student class-list or an electoral register), the religiously unmarked names will in the great majority of cases be those of Christians. Virtually all Muslims have a distinctively Muslim name (though most have Yoruba surnames), and are more likely to be known by it. A Muslim woman friend of mine now in her 40s let me call her Sidikat - told me that while she was a student she was more than once asked (often with a note of reproach) by Christian fellow students why she didnt use a Yoruba name like Aduke or Funmi. It is not surprising that Muslim politicians often prefer to use a Yoruba, rather than a Muslim, forename e.g. Bola, rather than Ahmed, Tinubu as they must appeal to a cross-religious public; and to use Yoruba versions of Muslim names (e.g. Lamidi, or even just Lam, for Abdul-Hamid; Lasisi for Abdul-Aziz). These differences with Christians more likely to present themselves as plain Yoruba, while Muslims are more likely to advertise their religion in their preferred names do not indicate any difference in the intensity of personal belief, but are the outcomes of the cultural logics of the two faiths.

Religious language. Here we find the same logic at work as with dress and personal names, with the Christian adoption of a great deal of the religious terminology of Arabic derivation already in use among Muslims. Some of this had already lost its religious marking by the C19: words such as alafia, peace, well-being; anu mercy. Some other words with a more definite religious content, like alufa (pastor, priest), adura (prayer), woli (prophet), iwasu (sermon) were soon naturalized as Christian terms, chiefly at the instance of Bishop Crowther, the principal translator of the Yoruba Bible. It seems reasonable to assume that the orthography he adopted in writing these terms comes close to expressing their actual phonetic values in C19 Yoruba Muslim speech, e.g. as regards the insertion of the u in alufa, or the r in adura. Of the various names and epithets of God that were current in the C19, Olorun (Lord of Heaven) was by far the preferred vernacular term among Muslims and was adopted without question by Christians, thus providing a common linguistic reference-point for people of all faiths.

In recent decades there has been some movement of linguistic self-differentiation in Yoruba Islam. An interesting case is the use of waasi instead of iwasu for sermon, which is a shift to a Hausa form from the original Songhay-derived word (both deriving from the Arabic waz). It seems most likely that this occurred as a spontaneous effect of the growing links between Yoruba and Hausa Muslims that occurred in the late C19 and early C20, rather than as a conscious attempt to differentiate Islam from Christianity. However that may be, its effect was to leave the old Muslim word as a Christian word. For Muslim cleric, alfa (or sometimes, phonetically closer to popular speech, afaa) has long been the preferred usage, presumably to differentiate it from alufa, Christian clergyman. Two other shifts can be pinpointed more exactly, to a new translation of the Quran published in 1977 under the auspices of the World Muslim League made by a committee of senior ulama including Shaykh Adam al-Ilori that has become in effect the authorized version for Yoruba Muslims. One is a very slight shift towards Arabic usage: adua rather than adura for prayer. The other is phonetically equally slight, but more telling in intention and potentially more momentous in effect. It is the substitution of Olohun for Olorun as the preferred Muslim rendition of God in Yoruba. This hardly registers in speech at all, since h is barely aspirated and r is only rolled lightly in Yoruba both sound pretty much like Oloun but in a text, like the NASFAT Prayer Book, the difference strikes the eye.

A brief explanation of the change is given in the preface of the 1977 translation. Olorun is said to be unacceptable because it literally means the one who owns heaven only but [by implication] not the earth (eniti oni orun nikan ko si ni aiye). Olohun is glossed as eniti o ni ohun lori enikeni (the one who has ohun over everyone), which is claimed to be the equivalent of the Arabic Allahu or Allahuma (O God!). But what does ohun mean? Not a word in very common use, it has the connotations of taboo or forbidden thing, as in the phrase o ti johun (he has done something he shouldnt, or he has incurred a penalty). Evidently al-Ilori, as the leading translator, meant to convey by Olohun something like the one who has the right to possession or obedience. Abubakre thinks it possible that ohun may also have some of the connotations of the Arabic concept of haram (forbidden, but with the sense of holy or revered when applied to God, like sacer in Latin), but still concludes that Olohun is a rare and difficult word formation in Yoruba. Despite the semi-official status of the translation proposed by al-Ilori, many Yoruba Muslims whether literate in Arabic or not still prefer Olorun, or are inclined to provide their own etymologies for the difficult neologism. I once heard a preacher at a NASFAT Asalatu service explain Olohun by deriving it from olohun-gbogbo (owner of all things), which he saw as equivalent to the Arabic phrase Rabil-alamin (Lord of all created beings) at Q. 1.2. This may be theologically sound, but it makes no etymological sense in Yoruba.

But perhaps more significant than this small step away from the religious lexicon common to Yoruba of all faiths, is the decision that al-Ilori and his fellow translators did not take: to decline to translate Allah at all, and instead to introduce the Arabic name of God into the Yoruba text. In fact, two other recent Muslim translations have done just this: one brought out by Ahmadiyya in 1976, and one published by Professor Y.A. Quadri in 1997. In principle that might have been the first step towards naturalizing Allah as the Yoruba name for the Supreme Being among Muslims, as it has happened in Hausa, Fulfulde, Mande and the languages of other long-Muslim peoples (but notably not Swahili), though that outcome is now effectively ruled out by the fact that so many Yoruba are Christian. The name Allah (in phonetic Yoruba form, Aala) was not intrinsically novel in a Yoruba text: it occurs not only in the popular devotional Muslim songs called waka, but even in Ifa divination verses. Granted this background, the decision not to use the word Allah for God has to be seen as highly deliberate. It is as if al-Ilori (who was always concerned to balance his Islamic with his Yoruba loyalties) wanted to set a limit to the extent to which Yoruba Islam should distance itself from what was common, traditional and characteristic in Yoruba culture. There was a danger in allowing Christians to take exclusive possession of the name that Yoruba had always applied to God. So I interpret the adoption of Olohun, which sounds less different than it looks, as a carefully calibrated way of correcting, but yet retaining, the age-old Yoruba designation of God.

IV

Sharia and communityPotentially the most far-reaching instance of the Muslim assertion of difference from common Yorubaness lies in the demand for Sharia. When the issue of Sharia came up in the constitutional assembly in 1977, Yoruba Muslims had had very limited experience of it, since the British had squashed the few incipient moves towards it early in the colonial period, and required Yoruba of all faiths to live together under the same Native Law and Custom. The issue was re-ignited in 1999-2000, when twelve Northern States decided to adopt Sharia for criminal as well as civil cases. What first became clear in 1977, and has continued to be the case ever since, is that while most of the formal Muslim leadership, whether lay intellectuals like Adegbite or Shittu, or Muslim title-holders like Arisekola, or leading members of the ulama, profess themselves to be strongly in favour of Sharia, the mass of ordinary lay Muslims (including those who are traditional rulers or politicians) are far from enthusiastic about it. It is not hard to see why. The introduction of full Sharia in the North, while it generated much tension and (in some places, like Kaduna) violence, was at least in a region where religious and ethnic differences already tended to coincide, so that what Sharia implied was a deeper Islamization of groups that were already Muslim, leaving non-Islamic groups to their own legal devices (at least in theory). In the Yoruba case, however, where not just all communities but also many families are mixed in religion, the notion of a separate law for Muslims must have an ominous potential to divide the community at all levels. I just cannot see Sharia being generally implemented in Yorubaland, and I suspect that most of its advocates do not either.

Yet there is a substantial continuing literature petitions, articles, books in which the themes of the late 1970s are reiterated three decades later. It is passionate but little focussed on what the implementation of Sharia would mean concretely in the Yoruba situation, on such issues such as: exactly how far would Sharia law extend, what would its effects be on the integration of local communities, how could a law supposed to apply only to Muslims be made work for religiously mixed families, how to reconcile the Christian population to its introduction and, even more, how to deal with the reservations of reluctant Muslims some of whose freedoms would be curtailed by it. The arguments for it are typically very general, pitched at the level of high religious principle:

Sharia is such a concomitant of Islam that to deny access to it is to infringe on [a Muslims] right to freedom of worship. This is because Islam is not just a set of rituals but a complete way of life ... Unlike other faiths, Islam provides for its adherents guidance in all aspects of human behaviour and obliges them to strictly follow that guidance. ... Sharia is to a Muslim like a soul to a body.

This is couched in such a way as to make it hard for Muslims to oppose Sharia-implementation without opening themselves to the danger of takfir, of being declared to be not true Muslims or of being, as one Ahl us-Sunna activist put it to me, referring scornfully to a leading Muslim politician in Lagos State, half-Muslim and half-Christian. In fact, this kind of Sharia advocacy has little to do with Christianity, and everything to do with enlisting the help of the state in the continuing campaign by rigorist Muslims, both lay and clerical, to put pressure on their more easygoing co-religionists to adopt a more complete and (as they see it) correct practice of Islam. The notion of Islam as a complete way of life presents a fundamental challenge to the way in which most ordinary Yoruba Muslims have viewed the relationship between their religion and their culture. There are many popular sayings along the lines of:

I will practise my traditional rites [oro ile mi, lit. the custom of my house]. Christianity will not stop me, Islam will not stop me, from practising my traditional rites

When a Muslim is not hungry, he says he wont eat monkey flesh [a Muslim dietary taboo]. When Sule is hungry, hell eat colobus monkey

Since such attitudes, however much they obtain in practice, are not easy for Muslims to assert as the basis for open opposition to Sharia, there is instead much dissembling and foot-dragging. As the strongly pro-Sharia author of a thesis ruefully commented on the respondents in a survey he had conducted:

Some Muslims were hypocritical in their opinions. They seemed to be sceptical ... on [the] re-establishment of Sharia in southern part of Nigeria. Although they hypocritically supported its re-establishment, it seemed they cherished and professed the Western system, but pretended to us ...

In the absence of any articulated opposition to Sharia-implementation on Muslim grounds if that were possible especially by recognized Muslim leaders, we find two ways of reconciling commitment in principle with the recognition of practical impossibility. One is to treat it simply as a very long-term objective, as I found in talking to a group of MSS activists, all vehement supporters of what had been done in northern Nigeria. For the shorter term, they also had ideas about trying it out on a small scale, by doing a sort of hijra and establishing small-scale communities where Muslims might realize the ideal of a common life lived according to Sharia. Another, more concrete but strictly limited experiment, is the Islamic court set up under the auspices of the League of Imams and Alfas at Ibadan Central Mosque where, on a voluntary basis, Muslims might submit cases for adjudication under Sharia, mostly concerning domestic issues.

The other approach is to argue that what is needed, and can be realized, in southern Nigeria is a Sharia of the soul. This was expounded to me by Alhaji Akinbode, the Chief Missioner of NASFAT:

If there is no institutionalized Sharia, [there can still be] personalized Sharia. If men are good, there is no need for the state to intervene. Let us make ourselves perfect ... You can be policeman of your own soul ... we concentrate on the soul ... [and seek to build] a disciplined personality rather than the disciplined state.

This seems to fit well with the experience of NASFATs core constituency, educated Muslims who work alongside Christian colleagues in the modern commercial sector, who can appreciate see the sheer unviability of having a separate legal sphere for Muslims. The ideal of personal piety which is expressed here seems to have an affinity with the outlook of many Born-Again Christians, especially those of a holiness tendency.

Muslim attitudes on the proper relation between their religion and Yoruba culture cover a wide spectrum, as can be seen from with the views of two prominent figures that stand at either end of it. They are Chief Lanrewaju Adepoju, a famous poet in the Yoruba language and now a Muslim of strongly Salafist views, and the Alafin of Oyo, the most senior-ranking oba to be a Muslim. They used to be friends, but are now bitter enemies over this very issue.

Adepoju is an entirely self-taught man who achieved renown in the 1960s for his practice of a kind of satirical poetry called ewi. He had his own radio programme for many years and earned the sobriquet of ojogbon elewi (professor or the wisest of ewi poets). He was born a Muslim to poor parents in one of Ibadans farm villages, but had no Koranic education, and was not religiously observant. For a number of years, indeed, he became a sort of freethinking Christian, and was drawn into some cultic activities which he later strongly repudiated. Eventually, after reading a biography of the Prophet Mohammed which he chanced upon in an Islamic bookshop in London, he returned to Islam, espousing a rigorously Salafist position and founding the Universal Muslim Brotherhood, which is part of the Ahl us-Sunna grouping. In his compound in Ibadan he has built a tiny mosque, complete with a minaret, as well as a recording studio; his wives now go about as black-veiled eleha; and in his study he has many works of tafsir and entire sets of hadith. Adepoju insists that there is much more to Islam than just the Five Pillars, since it also requires complete adherence to the Sunna of the Prophet, as evidenced in the hadith. Since for him Islam is a complete way of life and itself a culture [my italics], even the question of a relationship with Yoruba culture seems to be theoretically precluded: it is simply a question of Yoruba Muslims adopting the supposedly complete culture of Islam. So in interview I did not find it easy to get Adepoju to specify how Yoruba values might contribute positively to a Yoruba expression of Islam respect for elders, he eventually said. Instead, he stressed how he had broken from his ugly past (sounding for a moment a bit like a Born-Again Christian). He was eloquent about what he called the ugly aspects of Yoruba culture, such as its funeral customs and cult practices, and denounced those whom he regarded as nominal and syncretistic Muslims, such as charm-making alfa and Tijaniyya adherents. In 1995, after a confrontation between Muslims and traditionalists over the conduct of the Oro festival at Oyo, Adepoju circulated an ewi on audio-cassette which abused the Alafin by calling him oba keferi (pagan king).

Now obas are at the centre of these culture-wars, for they are the embodied symbols of the unity and integrity of their communities, and are thus expected (whatever their personal beliefs) to sponsor and patronize all forms of religion, as contributing to the welfare of the town. This norm has been somewhat eroded since the 1950s, both through obas refusing to take part in rituals they find offensive and through pressure on them from religiously-motivated outsiders. This has come from both Christians and Muslims, such as on the one side Olubadan Akinyele (who before he discontinued Gbigbohun-Tira, had on promotion to the title of Balogun refused to propitiate the war-staff with the usual blood-sacrifices) or on the other, the Awujale of Ijebu, the Muslim Sikiru Adetona, who from early in his reign in the 1960s has refused to participate in the annual Agemo festival, the major integrative ritual of the Ijebu kingdom. There has even come into existence an Association of Born-Again Christian Obas which functions as a pressure- and support-group for rulers who want to pick and choose what rituals they engage in, sometimes against the wishes of their subjects. Another Muslim oba, the Ataoja of Oshogbo, where the famous riverside shrine of the goddess Osun now has the status of a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is a potential tourist attraction, complains about the persistent nagging of Dr Adegbite, who (he is reported as saying) is always in palaces ... challenging the souls of rulers ... he would want me to move 100% towards Islam ... he is always saying Kabiyesi, se gbo mi na o? [Your majesty, are you listening to me?]. Yet, he adds, it is not easy to divorce ourselves from our tradition, anyone who tries it will run into trouble. So the old expectations about obas have by no means lost all their power, and nowhere more so than at Oyo, for all that it is now a predominantly Muslim town.

Alhaji Lamidi Adeyemi III, the Alafin of Oyo, is a genial and widely-respected oba, and at least a third-generation Muslim (in fact the son of that Alafin whom Chief Awolowo reprimanded for his lack of royal dress-sense). He is also regarded as the earthly successor to Sango, the thunder-god whose cult is central to Oyo kingship. Well-practised in expounding Oyo history and culture to visitors, he was not at all fazed when I asked him how he reconciled the discharge of his traditional duties with his personal identity as a Muslim. He did it by means of an ingenious two-way assimilation between Islam and Yoruba culture. Firstly, he read Islam a long way back into Oyo history, maintaining that even Sango, deified after his death for his magical powers, had been a Muslim, and was actually given the epithet Akewugberu (One who gets a slave for reciting the Koran). At the same time, he interpreted Islamic conversion as an expedient policy of self-protection against the Fulani jihadists, and at the same time subordinated it to Yoruba cultural values: the Yoruba never allowed other religions to destroy their identity. The Alafins vision of Yoruba history, in fact, has more in common with the Rev. Samuel Johnsons than with Shaykh Adam al-Iloris, and his response to my question on the Sharia issue was robust and indignant:

Is [Sharia] practical? Is it fair? ... [Its effect on the Yoruba would be] to enslave their mentality, to bar their values and make them lose their identity. Yoruba is a nation, not a tribe, a nation!

About Dr Adegbite he was frankly dismissive, and as for Adepoju (when I cautiously mentioned his name), he is like a bat [an ambiguous, ill-omened animal] dangling between two cultures. The Alafins old-fashioned view as to the religious obligations of an oba may be under pressure from the assertiveness of the new movements in Islam and Christianity, but it still has widespread popular support.

In principle Yoruba Muslims face a political dilemma of a kind that Christians do not face. It arises from a double vulnerability: compared with their Christian fellow-Yoruba they have often felt themselves to fall short in the modern Yoruba quality of olaju or enlightenment, as evidenced in their lower level of Western education; while compared with their non-Yoruba fellow-Muslims they have often been stung by being treated as inferior Muslims. Over recent decades they have done much to upgrade themselves on both fronts, though not without some contradictions: no body did more to bring modern education to Yoruba Muslims than did Ahmadiyya, but Ahmadiyya fell victim to a movement within global Islam that that they had little choice but to accept if they wanted to be treated as authentic Muslims. The dilemma of Yoruba Muslims is: how far, or in what respects, do they identify themselves with Northern Muslims or with Yoruba Christians?

V

Religion and the Yoruba political projectAs far as politics goes, the Yoruba, whatever their religion, are much more governed by pragmatic than ideological considerations. Certainly, some Yoruba Muslims have entertained the idea of creating a party with an explicitly confessional basis, which no Christians have done. Such was the National Muslim League which was founded in 1957, partly in protest at what its founders saw as the excessively Christian face of the Action Group but it was rapidly squashed with the help of judicious concessions to some of the Muslim demands. It is intriguing to speculate whether Adelabu, who had then just done the hajj, which not only boosted his Muslim piety but brought him into close contact with the Sardauna of Sokoto, might not have turned towards a more Islamic politics, involving a separate region based on Ibadan and an alliance with the Muslim-dominated Northern Region, if he had not died in a car accident in 1958. But the political alliance of West and North, as represented by Akintolas NNDP and the Sardaunas NPC, which took place a few years later (1963-66), arose in a very different way, and had little to do with religion.

It is understandable that David Laitin, reviewing this history at the end of the 1970s, should conclude that the Yoruba were remarkable for their resistance to any politicization of religious identities, and credited Yoruba Muslims for a crucial moderating role on the first Sharia dispute. It is ironical, therefore, that the 1980s saw unprecedented levels of antagonism between the two faiths in Yorubaland, particularly in Ibadan, where the UPN Governor, Bola Ige, provoked strong Muslim opposition to some of his policies and a bitter, protracted quarrel broke out over the cross located within sight of the UI mosque in 1985-86. A key role in this was played by M.K.O. Abiola, styled Baba Adinni (Father of the Faith) of Yorubaland, who combined the strenuous assertion of Muslim identity - including support for Sharia - with political alliance with the Muslim elites of the North who dominated the NPN. Thus the Awolowo/Adelabu, AG/NNDP antithesis largely reproduced itself in the UPN/NPN divide, now somewhat aligned with Christian/Muslim interests. But if it was starting to look as though, contra Laitin, the religious divide might become politicized, the next round of civilian politics in the 1990s would prove it otherwise. Abiola, no doubt because his NPN affiliation and Islamizing posture in the 1980s made the Northern establishment see him as a reliable ally in the South, was chosen as the presidential candidate of the SDP, one of the two parties sanctioned for the return to civilian rule in 1993. But then fate, or rather the logic of the politico-religious situation, intervened. Abiola won the election because southern Nigerians chose to regard him as the anti-Northern candidate, so that the SDP became de facto the successor party to the AG and UPN. When the election was annulled and Abiola was imprisoned by General Abacha, the historical irony deepened: the erstwhile anti-Awoist became an avatar of Awolowo. The religious coding of the conflict produced further ironies of its own. In the mid-1990s, the Caliphate became a sobriquet for military-Northern-Islamic rule, especially among Christians, while the rhetoric of Pentecostal rebirth provided an apt common idiom for the yearning to see a complete makeover of the Nigerian order. (I have often been amused by the facility of many Yoruba Muslims in talking Born-Again English.) Abiola, indeed, almost acquired the status of a kind of honorary Christian, and in 1994 I once saw a newspaper headline ask: MKO Born Again? On the other hand, it was an awkward time for Yoruba Muslims, for all that they included some high-profile opponents of Abacha notably the radical lawyer, Chief Gani Fawehinmi, or Abiolas senior wife, Kudirat, who was assassinated at Abachas behest. Relations between Yoruba and Northern Muslims on the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs became badly fractured, and Abdul-Azeez Arisekola, the Are Musulumi of Yorubaland, a close friend and business associate of Abachas, was nearly lynched by students in 1995 when he ill-advisedly visited the UI campus. But undeniably, the political situation of the 1990s brought Yoruba Muslims and Christians together as Yoruba against (Muslim) Northerners.The Obasanjo presidency brought a realignment of relations between the religious and the political. Though Yoruba, Obasanjo was a strong federalist and never close to the pro-Awolowo political mainstream. His party, the PDP, stood roughly in the lineage of the Northern-led coalitions of earlier years, while in the 1999 election the South-West again showed its fidelity to the Awoist tradition by giving its support to the AD (later AC), though this was eroded by the PDPs exercise of power in later elections. Significantly, the PDP first broke through in Oyo State, the mainly-Muslim heartland of previous resistance to the Yoruba political mainstream, from Adelabu down to the NPN, whose exemplary figure was Ibadans notorious godfather, Alhaji Lamidi Adedidu. Even so, there was little correlation between the PDP/AD opposition and the Muslim/Christian divide at least at the macro level. Obasanjo claimed to be a Born-Again Christian, and surrounded himself with a coterie of Pentecostal mentors (prominent among whom was the head of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, Pastor Adeboye, whom some credited with having predicted the demise of Abacha). But this won him little support among the mass of Yoruba Christians, even among Pentecostalists: he was (and is) seen as no proper Yoruba, as altogether lacking the qualities of an omoluwabi. On the other hand, Muslims no longer had any reason to regard themselves as sidelined in the parties of the AG/UPN/AD/AC/ACN lineage. The stronghold of Awoist politics is Lagos State, whose indigenous core is mainly Muslim, and whose leaders from L.K Jakande though Bola Tinubu to Babatunde Fashola have also been Muslims. Perhaps the most telling sign of Yoruba Muslim attachment to their ethnic, rather than their religious identity, is the prominence of Muslim young men in the Oodua Peoples Congress, the vigilantist organization which was involved in attacks on Hausa migrants (in particular) in the early 2000s. Here the Yoruba conformed to the general pattern of southern and Christian Nigeria, in that the anger and resentment of marginalized urban youth was projected along ethnic lines, rather than taking the form of the often-violent religious radicalism Maitatsine, pro-Sharia hisba groups, Boko Haram that has characterized the Muslim North.

In this history are evident two trends, which if not contradictory, at least stand in some tension with one another. The first concerns the relations between religion and ethnicity, where Yoruba Muslims have over recent decades laid more emphasis on their differences as Muslims against the common culture they share with Christian Yoruba. The call of Sharia as a religious obligation, unrealised and unrealistic as it may seem, to the most Islamically self-conscious among them, is the most extreme form of this tendency. This is surely grounded in a historic tendency within Islam generally, by which those on the edge of Islam have sought to move towards its centre, but it is also prompted by contemporary currents in the rest of Muslim world, of which Yoruba Muslims are more aware than they used to be. The other concerns the link between ethnicity and politics, where the appeal of a Muslim-based politics (involving alliance with Muslim forces in the North) has receded from a high point in the 1980s, as Yoruba Muslims see that the only practical politics for them as Yoruba is to make common cause with their Christian compatriots. There may arise religiously-specific conflicts of interest between them (as over the ownership of schools in the 1990s), and the intensification of religious self-awareness (on both sides) since the late 1970s may make such cooperation more difficult, so it is a cooperation inevitably requiring mutual regard and forbearance which more than ever must be worked at.

I will conclude with two vignettes from field research in Ibadan in 2009, which illustrate how ordinary Yoruba continuously seek to produce this mutual regard in daily life:

The local ward development committee in Yemetu Aladorin meets to launch a primary health-care programme for women and children. It is chaired by a local imam, and the six committee members present include both Muslims and Christians. At the end of the proceedings, the imam recites the Surat ul-Fatiha in Arabic, and I notice even the Christians trying to follow it with their lips. One of the Christians then says a short informal prayer in Yoruba, ending with loruko Jesu Kristi Oluwa wa!, to which everyone responds E yin Ologo! The imam rounds off by saying Hallelu! three times.

Two women from St. Pauls Anglican Church take me on a tour of the back alleys of Yemetu to explore the variety of little churches and mosques. We get to a small ratibi mosque, whose elderly imam belongs to the Bamidele sect; and the two teachers in the primary school attached to it are both eleha. Before we get to our discussion, which might touch on sensitive religious differences, one of the women recalls to the imam an incident a little while back. A little girl, a pupil of the mosque school, had been knocked down by an okada in the main road. The church lady picked her up, sorted her out and brought her back to the mosque. The imam thanks her again warmly for what she had done, and our discussion proceeds. A common ground of Yoruba humanity has been reaffirmed. No surprise that the imam later says that Muslims and Christians, while they go their different ways for religious purposes, should still regard one another as omo-iya.

If such modest examples are emulated by politicians and religious leaders in more public spheres, the amity between Islam and Christianity which has been one of the most remarkable achievements of the Yoruba has a good chance of being maintained. A History of the Yoruba People (Dakar: Amalion Publishing, 2010), a massive work of 498 pages. His first book, Revolution and Power Politics in Yorubaland 1840-1893: Ibadan Expansion and the Rise of Ekitiparapo (London: Longman 1971), a notable and characteristic volume in the Ibadan History Series, opened the way for Akintoyes appointment to a chair at the University of Ife (as it then was). He left academic life for politics in the 1970s and became a Senator (1979-83) for the UPN, the Action Groups successor party. Later he pursued an academic career in the USA.

On which see Wale Adebanwi, Structure and Agency in a Cult of Power: A Study of the Yoruba Power Elite (unpublished Cambridge PhD thesis, 2008), a work which I hope will soon be published as a monograph.

Blydon, Christianity, Islam, 14, 43.

Quoted Peel, REMY, 205. On Johnson more generally, see E.A. Ayandele, Holy Johnson: Pioneer of African Nationalism (London: Cass, 1970).

T. Falola (ed.), Pioneer, Patriot and Patriarch: Samuel Johnson and the Yoruba People (Madison: African Studies Program, University of Wisconsion, 1993), M. Doortmont, Recapturing the Past: Samuel Johnson and the Construction of the History of the Yoruba (Erasmus University Rotterdam, PhD thesis, 1994), J.D.Y. Peel, Two Pastors and their Histories: Samuel Johnson and C.C. Reindorf, in P. Jenkins (ed.), The Recovery of the West African Past: African Pastors and African History in the Nineteenth Century (Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 1998).

Johnson, History, 642.

Margaret T. Drewal, Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency (Bloomington Indiana University Press, 1992), Chap. 8, I. Nolte, Obafemi Awolowo and the Making of Remo (Edinburgh University Press for International African Institute), 214-228.

Peel, The pastor and the babalawo, Africa 60 (1990), 157-70.

D.O. Epega, The Mystery of Yoruba Gods (1932). Epega, from Ode Remo, was a pastor of one of the African Churches.

Further on Lijadu see Adegbola, op. cit, fn. 14, Peel, Between Crowther and Ajayi, in T. Falola (ed.),

Ph.D. thesis, University of Bristol, 1976. For a fuller appreciation, Peel Yoruba Religion: Seeing it in History, Seeing it Whole (Third Bishop Adegbola Memorial lecture), to appear in Orita.

S. Adeniran, The Ethiopian Church: A National Necessity (1918). Adeniran is a shadowy figure. As S.A. Oke, he had been a pastor in the United African Native Church, and seems to have been radicalized by the collective trauma of the great influenza pandemic of 1918.

Karin Barber, Discursive strategies in the texts of Ifa and in the Holy Book of Odu in the African Church of Orunmila, in K. Barber and P.F. de M. Farias (eds.), Self-Assertion and Cultural Brokerage, 196-224.

W. Abimbola (with I. Miller), Ifa Can Mend Our Broken World: Thoughts on Yoruba Religion and Culture in Africa and the Diaspora (Roxbury, Mass.: Aim Books, 1997)

A. Apter, The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

As Apter notes without elaboration in his very last sentence: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture, 284.

Asonzeh Ukah , A New Paradigm of Pentecostal Power: a Study of the redeemed Christian Church of God in Nigeria (Trenton NJ: Africa World Press, 2008), 119.

On perceptions of the British conquest as rule by Christians, see texts cited in J.N. Paden, Religion and Political Culture in Kano (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 53-54.

A. M. Yakubu, Saadu Zungur: an Anthology of the Social and Political Writings of a Nigerian Nationalist (Kaduna: Nigerian Defence Academy Press, 1999). Saadu was an accomplished poet in Hausa, two of his best known poems being Wakar Bidia (Against Heresy) and Mulkin Nasara (European Colonialism). That is Yakubus translation, which is less telling than its literal meaning: Christian Rule.

Africa in Ebullition ( Ibadan: Board Publications , 2008 [1952]), 63.

For a detailed account, see I.A. Jimoh, Arguments and Counter-Arguments in Selected Works in Arabic by Nigerian authors (University of Ibadan PhD thesis, 2005).

L. Brenner, Muslim divination and the history of religion in Sub-Saharan Africa, in J. Pemberton (ed.), Insight and Artistry: A Cross Cultural Study of Divination in Central and West Africa (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000), 45-59. Islamic divination is known as sand-writing (Yanrin Tite) in Yoruba, or ar-Raml in Arabic. The name Orunmila is widely considered by Yoruba Christians (from Lijadu onwards) to be a contracted form of some such phrase as Orun li o mo ilaja (It is Heaven which knows reconciliation) or Orun lo mo eniti yio la (Heaven knows who will be saved). Edifying as this is, it seems to me equally possible (and perhaps phonetically more likely), that it derives from ar-Raml, with vowels added to fit the patterns of Yoruba speech.

As reported by a missionary in Abeokuta in 1877: see Peel, REMY, 115.

For Johnson, History of the Yorubas, 32-33, Setilu was taken to be a Nupe, expelled from his home by Muslims. See further Farias, Yoruba Origins Revisited by Muslims, 123-25, esp. on Setilus origin as Satih b. Rabia.

Abdul-Raheem Shittu (b. 1953) is a lay intellectual Muslim and qualified lawyer, former MSS activist, elected UPN member for his home-town Shaki in 1979, but later aligned with NPN. Though not literate in Arabic which is why many educated ulama look askance at him he is a prolific author of polemical books, and serves as legal advisor to the Salafist Ahl us-Sunna group of Muslim organizations.

A.-R. Shittu, interview, 5 April 2009.

A.-R. Shittu, What is Sunnah? What is Bidah? (Shaki: al-Furqaan Publishers, 1996), 32, inveighing against many Muslims attachment to Yoruba funeral practices: it is in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Islamic and Muslim countries that unalloyed commitment to [Islam] is culturally-entrenched and governmentally enforced. One can say that such communities would be better standard-bearers of pristine Islam than most other communities where legacies of atheistic and other un-Islamic cultural traditions are umbilically attached to Islamic norms.

K.K. Oloso, Hajj and Its Operations in Nigeria, 1854-1880 (University of Ibadan PhD thesis, 1984).

This is known as takfir, the declaration of a person or group as kafir or unbelievers. New to the tolerant Yoruba, it was a standard tactic of political conflict among Muslims in the pre-colonial North, since it changed the status under Sharia law of those it so stigmatized (e.g. it permitted them to be enslaved). It was used by Usman dan Fodio to legitimate his uprising against the Muslim rulers of pre-jihad Hausaland, and was mutually employed by him and the Shehu of Borno in their diplomatic skirmishing: see L. Brenner, The Jihad Debate between Sokoto and Borno: an Historical Analysis of Islamic Political Discourse in Nigeria, in J.F.A. Ajayi and J.D.Y. Peel (eds.), People and Empires in African History: Essays in memory of Michael Crowder (London: Longman, 1992), 21-44.

Acronym of the Nasril-Lahi-l-Fatih Society of Nigeria, a modernist and ecumenical Muslim body founded in 1995. See further B. Soares, An Islamic social movement in contemporary West Africa: NASFAT of Nigeria, in S. Ellis and I van Kessel (eds.), Movers and Shakers: Social Movements in Africa (Leiden: Brill, 2009); and other references below.

There resulted a bitter exchange of articles in the Lagos press putting forward the pro- and anti-Ahmadi arguments, which Balogun later arranged to be reprinted: I.A.B. Balogun, Islam versus Ahmadiyya in Nigeria (Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1977). I am grateful to Dr L.O. Abbas for procuring a copy of this for me.

Officially known as Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat Nigeria. I am grateful to Alhaji Abdul-Gani Sobambi for details, a senior missioner of Ahmadiyya, interview, 4 April 2009.

For the early history of the MSS see K.K. Oloso, The Contribution of the Muslim Students Society of Nigeria to the Islamic resurgence in Southern Nigeria, 1954-1980 (University of Ibadan, MA thesis, 1981). Also interview with Dr Oloso (who was MSS President in 1980-81), 9 May 2009. For Adegbites role in it see M.A. Adedayo, Abdul-Lateef Adegbite: A Life for the People (Lagos: WEPCOM Publishers, 2006), 131-37.

P.B. Clarke and I. Linden, Islam in Modern Nigeria: a Study of a Muslim Community in a Post-Independence State, 1960-1983 (Grunewald: Kaiser, 1984), 50.

Adedayo, Abdul-Lateef Adegbite, 140-45.

See pamphlet by a lecturer at Lagos State University, Shaykh Luqman Jimoh, Moon Sighting: An Essential Manual (Lagos: Jamiyyat Junud Dinil-Islamiyyah, 2000), with foreword by Dr Lateef Adegbite. It refers to a clutch of previous articles and books on the subject.

A.M. Sanni, Eid controversy in Nigeria and the problem of legitimation: the Sultan and his opponents!, personal e-mail communication.

L.F. Oladimeji, Dawah Trend in Islam: a case study of the Jamat ut-Tabligh in Nigeria (University of Ilorin PhD thesis, 2004)

E.A. Adedun, Slang as a Dialect: A Study of the Use of Language among Undergraduates of the University of Lagos (University of Lagos, Faculty of Arts Monograph Series, no. 8, 2008), 27.

Dr K.K. Oloso, Interview, 8 April 2009.

H. Townsend in 1847, cited Peel, REMY, 194.

Rev. T.A.J. Ogunbiyi, visiting Ikale country in 1908, commented on a mania among the converts for English clothes, whose effects he sometimes found ridiculous, but yet thought who will dare blame them for this when it is known that the very putting on of an English dress is an ensign that Christ is reigning within them : Report of a Mission Tour to the Eastern District of Lagos (CMS Papers, G3A2, 1909, no. 34).

Macaulay was the Principal of the CMS Grammar School, the son-in-law of Bishop Crowther and the father of Herbert Macaulay. There is an indirect link with his namesake, Lord Macaulay, since his surname surely derived from that of Governor Macaulay of Sierra Leone, who shared an ancestor with the historian in the person of Zachary Macaulay, a prominent member of the Clapham Sect, which linked with the foundation of Sierra Leone. J. P. Haastrup was a prominent Lagos auctioneer, Methodist lay-preacher and pioneer of Yoruba hymnody. He got his unusual Danish surname from having lived in the house of a prominent Ijesha merchant called Frederick Kumokun Haastrup, who in turn got it from the CMS missionary who baptised him in Sierra Leone in the 1840s. Pythagoras must just have sounded splendid and impressive. Swept up in the wave of cultural nationalism in the 1890s, he later dropped J.P. for Ademuyiwa, to back up his claim to be a prince of Remo.

Al-Kurani ti a tumo si Ede Yoruba (Beirut: Dar al-Arabia, 1977).

Here I am greatly indebted to R. Deremi Abubakre, Linguistic and Non-Linguistic Aspects of Quran Translating to Yoruba (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1986), esp. 67-79, supplemented with interviews with Professors Amidu Sanni, 27 April 2009, and D.O.S. Noibi, 30 April 2009.

Alkurani Mimo ni Ede Yoruba ati Larubawa [The Holy Quran in the Yoruba Language and Arabic] (Lagos: Ahmadiyya Mission in Islam, 1976). This translation had been envisaged for decades, with part completed by Alhaji H.O. Sanyaolu as far back as 1957, but actually appeared after the crisis of Ahmadiyya in the mid-1970s. Al-Kuranu Alaponle. Itumo si Ede Yoruba [The Glorious Quran. Its Meaning in the Yoruba language] (Ijebu-Ode: Shebiotimo Press, 1997). Quadri was the son of the proprietor of the Shebiotimo Press, one of the longest established publishers of Islamic literature.

See example cited in Abubakre, Interplay of Arabic and Yoruba Cultures, 211. A long section of this study, 210-240, gives many illuminating examples of literary genres in which language-switching between Yoruba and Arabic occurs, thus potentially serving to ease the passage of names like Allah/Aala into Yoruba.

For the text of the 1894 petition of Lagos Muslims for Islamic courts, see T.G.O Gbadamosi, The Growth of Islam among the Yoruba 1841-1908 (London: Longman, 1978), 233-234. See too A.-F. Kola Makinde, The Institution of Shariah in Oyo and Osun States, Nigeria, 1890-2005 (University of Ibadan PhD thesis, 2007), Chapter 2. In addition to various requests for official Sharia courts to be set up, some degree of Sharia had been administered informally in pious Muslim circles in several towns, such as Iwo, Ikirun and Ede, and among the members of strict sects like the Bamidele of Ibadan.

For overall views, see P. Ostien, J.M. Nasir and F. Kogelmann (eds.), Comparative Perspectives on Shariah in Nigeria (Ibadan: Spectrum Books, 2005), Rotimi Suberu, Sharia and the Travails of Federalism in Nigeria (Research Report submitted to the French Institute for Research in Africa [IFRA], Ibadan 2007) and J. Harnischfeger, Democratization and Islamic Law: The Sharia Conflict in Nigeria (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2008).

For example Is-Haq Akintola, Shariah in Nigeria: an Eschatological Desideratum (Ijebu-Ode: Shebiotimo Publications, 2001); A.D. Ajijola, What is Shariah? (Kaduna: Straight Path Publishers, n.d.); Abdulkadir Orire, Sharia: a Misunderstood Legal System (Zaria: Sankore Publishers, 2007). Akintola is a lecturer at LASU and director of a Muslim human rights NGO, Ajijola a legal practitioner, Orire the former Grand Khadi of Kwara State.

D.O.S. Noibi and S.T. Malik, Memorandum to Members of the Constituent Assembly on the Shariah in the Draft Constitution in 1978. Much of this is recycled in the Memorandum to Osun State House of Assembly on the Review of 1999 Constitution presented by the League of Imams and Alfas, December 1999. Both documents are reproduced, as Appendices I and II, in Makinde, Institution of Shariah.

Quoted in Adekoya, Role of Music, Chapter 1.

Makinde, Institution of Shariah, 30.

Interview, 27 March 2008.

H.O. Danmole, Religious Encounter in Southwestern Nigeria: the Domestication of Islam among the Yoruba, in J.K. Olupona and T.Rey (eds.), Orisa Devotion as World Religion (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 202-21, esp. 215.

M. Drewal, Yoruba Ritual, 151.

Olufunke Adeboye, The Born-Again Oba: Pentecostalism and Traditional Chieftaincy in Yorubaland, Lagos Historical Review 7 (2007), 1-20.

Adedayo, Abdul-Lateef Adegbite, 151-52; Probst on Oshogbo as world heritage site.

Interview, 21 April 2008. Thanks to my former student, Dr Wale Adebanwi, for setting up these interviews with the Alafin and Chief Adepoju.

J.L. Matory, Rival empires: Islam and the religions of spirit possession among the Oyo-Yoruba, American Ethnologist 21 (1994), 495-515, further documents from fieldwork conducted in the northern Oyo town of Igboho in the late 1980s the local understanding of Sango as a Muslim, even at a time when conflict between Muslims and traditionalists was considerable. He even reports (fn. 34) a denunciation of orisa-worship from Adepoju, visiting to attend the opening of a new mosque. This aspect of Sango is altogether ignored in the recent collection of essays edited by J.E. Tishken, T. Falola and A. Akinyemi, Sango in Africa and the African Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).

David D. Laitin, Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious Change among the Yoruba (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), and The Sharia debate and the origins of Nigerias Second Republic, Journal of Modern African Studies 20 (1982).

Some 200 yards away from the mosque and in clear view from it, there had stood since 1954 a large white monumental cross, at a crossroads close to the Catholic chapel. Abiola took it into his head, possibly without premeditation, to demand that the cross be demolished. Other issues of Muslim grievance came into the dispute, which deepened when at one point the Muslim side invoked the intervention of the Federal Commissioner for education, a Northern Muslim. The dispute ran on for many months, but ended in a compromise: the cross stayed, but a concrete screen was erected between it and the mosque. Sources: the account by the (Christian) Vice-Chancellor, Ayo Banjo, In the Saddle: a Vice-Chancellors Story (Ibadan: Spectrum Books, 1997), 69-76; interview with Professor D.O.S. Noibi (who was imam at the time), 8 April 2009.

Even so, Adedibus long career shows the complex cross-overs which in which Yoruba politics abounds. Born 1927, he entered politics as a follower of the Rev. E.A. Alayande (a Christian convert from a Muslim background) in the Ibadan Peoples Party which merged into the Action Group. By 1979 he had switched to the other side, and was active in the NPN, which seems more natural for a populist Ibadan Muslim. The Third Republic found him with Abiola in the SDP. After 1999 he was the local power-broker and thug-master who in 2003 finally delivered Ibadan to the anti-Awoist PDP. He was almost certainly behind the notorious destruction by night of the statue of Chief Awolowo that had been placed in front of Government House: Adebanwi, Structure and Agency in a Cult of Power.

See Ebenezer Obadare, Pentecostal presidency? The Lagos-Ibadan theocratic class and the Muslim Other, Review of African Political Economy 110 (2006), 665-677 and Asonzeh Ukah, A New Paradign of Pentecostal Power: A Study of the Redeemed Christian God in Nigeria (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2008), esp. 200-205.

On this see Adebanwi, How not to be a proper Yoruba, Chapter 7 of Structure and Agency in a Cult of Power.

Aderemi S. Ajala and Insa Nolte, Yoruba ethnogenesis revisited: Religion and nationalism in Western Nigeria, unpublished paper presented at the African Studies Association of the UK, 2006.

See the special issue of Africa 78 (2008), 1-152, edited by David Pratten, Perspectives on Vigilantism in Nigeria, with papers by Pratten and Insa Nolte on the South, and by Laurent Fourchard, Murray Last, Adam Higazi and Fatima Adamu on the North.

This was my friend Salahuddeen Busairi, Imam of the Alhaji Yekini Adeoyo Mosque, to whom I am grateful for our many conversations about all aspects of Islam in Yorubaland. Though he pronounced it just as a Born-Again pastor might, he later justified his use of the phrase to me in terms of the Arabic meaning he attributed it, namely as Hu-a-i-lu, a contraction of Lahuala wala quwata ilabillah, There is no authority and power except through Allah: interview 5 May 2009.

This was Imam H.A. Oluwakemi at Akab